By Phil Mattera, Dirt Diggers Digest

I admit it -- the Dirt Diggers Digest is guilty of focusing on the bad
news about corporate misdeeds. So in this post I will write about
something positive: activist groups that are succeeding in changing
corporate behavior for the better.

The occasion for this shift in emphasis is the recent announcement
of the winners of the BENNY awards, which are given out by the Business Ethics Network.
BEN is an association of organizations and individuals involved in
corporate campaigns that seek to pressure companies to end injurious
practices relating to the environment, public health and the workplace.
(Full disclosure: I have served on BEN's advisory committee.)
Since 2005 BEN has been giving awards
celebrating outstanding victories. During the past few years it has
also honored groups that are making progress toward such victories and
given individual achievement awards to veteran campaigners.
Each time attend the awards ceremony and hear the descriptions of
the campaigns, I find my skeptical shell melting away in a wave of
optimism about the prospects for undoing corporate harm. This year was
no different.
There was a tie for 1st place in the main BENNY award between the Campaign for Fair Food and Think Before You Pink: "Yoplait -- Put A Lid On It!"
The Campaign -- led by the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) and supported by the Presbyterian Church (USA) and others in the Alliance for Fair Food -- has
made great strides in improving the working conditions of immigrant
farmworkers in southern Florida. The campaign has won a string of
victories by going around the growers who are the direct employers of
the workers and pressuring their major customers (fast food giants,
supermarket chains, and major food service companies) to pay more for
the produce with the understanding that the difference will go toward
higher wages.
Think Before You Pink
is a campaign led by Breast Cancer Action that has taken a critical
approach toward the growing corporate practice of putting pink ribbons
on their products to raise awareness of breast cancer. The campaign
started out examining whether those companies are contributing a
significant portion of the purchase price toward legitimate cancer
research. More recently, it has challenged pink-ribbon companies that
make products that have been linked to breast cancer (the campaign
calls it "pinkwashing").
One of its recent targets was Eli Lilly, which sells drugs meant to
reduce the risk of breast cancer while at the same time distributing
rGBH, an artificial growth hormone used by dairies that is a suspected
carcinogen. Earlier this year, the Think Before You Pink campaign got
General Mills to stop using rBGH in its Yoplait yogurt, which has extensively used pink-ribbon marketing.
BEN gave its first-place Path to Victory award to the Sierra Club's Beyond Coal Campaign, which is seeking to reduce use of the climate-destroying black fuel through efforts such as organizing students
at campuses which depend on coal-generated electricity. The campaign,
which is targeting some schools smack in the middle of coal country,
has released a tongue-in-cheek online video with the tagline "Coal is Too Dirty Even for College."
The Individual Achievement Award went to Sister Pat Daly, a veteran shareholder activist who heads the Tri-State Coalition for Responsible Investment,
an alliance of Roman Catholic groups in the New York City metropolitan
area. She is best known as one of the founders of Campaign ExxonMobil,
which pioneered the effort to get the giant oil company to take a less
irresponsible position on climate change.
At the BEN awards ceremony, Sister Pat also described facing down
former General Electric CEO Jack Welch at a company board meeting. For
years, she and other activists had been pressing GE to accept
responsibility for cleaning up the PCB contamination it had caused in
New York's Hudson River. And for years the company resisted. Welch's
successor Jeff Immelt eventually relented, and in May 2009 a clean-up
effort financed by GE finally began. Sister Pat's role in that victory certainly deserved to be honored.
Whether over the course of months or decades, the kinds of campaigns
celebrated by the BENNY Awards show that corporations can be made to do
the right thing.